Performance assessment of the induced seismicity traffic light protocol for northeastern British Columbia and western Alberta

Abstract In response to the increasing concern of possible seismic risk due to injection operations during development of unconventional hydrocarbon resources, regulators in both British Columbia (BC) and Alberta (AB), Canada, have adopted varying aspects of a traffic light protocol as part of their individual oversight and risk mitigation strategies. In this study, we compare the regional seismicity pattern with the database of injection parameters to assess the performance of the individual induced seismicity traffic light protocols (IS-TLP). The red-light threshold in both BC and AB is set at local magnitude (ML) = 4, which appears to be adequate in characterizing the potential seismic risk from induced earthquakes. Since 2014, there were three red-light events each in BC and AB, all related to hydraulic fracturing. In the three AB cases and one BC case, at least one 2 ≤ ML u003c 4 seismic event, characterized in AB as a yellow-light event, preceded the red-light event, suggesting that an IS-TLP based on e...